Welcome to my PHD Blog with some occasional asides on my daily life...

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Literary Meme

Feeling a little wobbly after a big day yesterday and night out afterwards. The post doc scholars and myself have been very looked after by ACSIS. We were taken out for dinner after the seminar and then met some other PhD students at "The World Bar" around the corner from the University. Great night!!!

On a slightly different matter, I have been invited to participate in a meme by Mac over at Stone in the Field, she keeps a great blog and one that I visit regularly.

A meme, for those who haven't heard of one before, is a replicating "form". It is like a memory trace in evolutionary terms and has been developed by various people like Stephen Dawkins to try to connect evolutionary theory with cultural and behavioural patterning. Memes, like this one, constitute a series of rules and some applied content. They spread like viruses but in fact are not necessarily self-replicating and can require human involvement/agency for the meme to spread. For this meme, I brought limited fiction books over to Sweden with me so I am putting this meme together with the non-fiction books that I'm currently reading for my PhD.

The meme rules are:

1. Take first five novels from your bookshelf.2. Book 1 -- first sentence3. Book 2 -- last sentence on page 504. Book 3 -- second sentence on page 1005. Book 4 -- next to the last sentence on page 1506. Book 5 -- final sentence of the book7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph.8. Feel free to "cheat" to make it a better paragraph.9. Name your sources10.Post to your blog.

Here's the result:

A philosopher to another philosopher observed, "There is a mystery. You are very well known and yet very unknown. Your fellow philosophers scarely read you."

The philosopher replied; "It is a matter of moving toward the world, making it mobile, bringing it to the site of controversy, keeping it engaged, and making it available for arguments. Only then, I think, can we learn to appreciate that the respect for me as an individual need not run counter to respect for others (in general), but that each is a condition of the other. On the other hand there are still those that are primarily interested in the social influence of the media, mainly the news."

The first philosopher comments, "Another area in which such bonds are evident is in wartime and postwar commemoration."

The books in order are:

1. Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture and Time translated by Roxanne Lapidus2. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies by Bruno Latour3. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction by Graeme Turner4. Moves in Modernity edited by Johan Fornäs and Göran Bolin5. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History